Dialogfenster

Based on the semestral issue 2018 “Urban Culture, Public Space and Housing”, a temporary position of a TU Wien Visiting Professor, starting on 1 March 2018, is available at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space at the Faculty of Architecture and Planning of TU Wien. During the year of the 10th anniversary of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, TU Wien will host a special Visiting Professorship that tries to redirect the attention at the interface of urban studies, planning theory and urban design approaches from the well-studied lived spaces in already existing areas of the city towards those urban areas currently under construction or to be built in the near future. What is the relation between public space policy and housing policy? How is density negotiated between different players involved and to what extent are social uses of zoning taken into account? Also, do these projects contribute to a shifting balance between urban tenants and urban land owners, or do we face other qualitative shifts in the composition of these new city parts? How are these related to the existing neighbourhoods? Which cultural challenges do planners face when working in the urbanization of at times quite peripheral areas? To what extent have lifestyles in these areas already been 'urbanized'? Read more

Publikationen

HOU, J. und KNIERBEIN, S. (2017 Routledge)

City Unsilenced: Urban resistance and public space in the age of shrinking democracy.

What do the recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common? What are the roles of public space in these movements? What are the implications of urban resistance for the remaking of public space in the "age of shrinking democracy"? To what extent do these resistances move from anti- to alter-politics?

City Unsilenced brings together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and scholar-activists to examine the spaces, conditions and processes in which neoliberal practices have profoundly impacted the everyday social, economic, and political life of citizens and communities around the globe. They examine the commonalities and specificities of urban resistance movements that respond to those impacts. They focus on how such movements make use of and transform the meanings and capacity of public space. They investigate their ramifications in the continued practices of renewing democracies. A broad collection of cases is presented and analyzed, including Movimento Passe Livre (Brazil), Google Bus Blockades San Francisco (USA), the Platform for Mortgage Affected People (PAH) (Spain), the Piqueteros Movement (Argentina), Umbrella Movement (Hong Kong), post-Occupy Gezi Park (Turkey), Sunflower Movement (Taiwan), Occupy Oakland (USA), Syntagma Square (Greece), 1DMX (Mexico), Miyashita Park Tokyo (Japan), 15-M Movement (Spain), and Train of Hope Vienna (Austria).

By better understanding the processes and implications of the recent urban resistances, City Unsilenced contributes to the ongoing debates concerning the role and significance of public space in the practice of lived democracy and lived space.

Public Space and Relational Perspectives. New Challenges for Architecture and Planning.

Traditional approaches to understand space tend to view public space mainly as a shell or container, focussing on its morphological structures and functional uses. That way, its ever-changing meanings, contested or challenged uses have been largely ignored, as well as the contextual and on-going dynamics between social actors, their cultures, and struggles. The key role of space in enabling spatial opportunities for social action, the fluidity of its social meaning and the changing degree of "publicness" of a space remain unexplored fields of academic inquiry and professional practice. Public Space and Relational Perspectives offers a different understanding of public spaces in the city. The aim of the book is to (re)introduce the lived experiences in public life into the teaching curricula of those academic disciplines which deal with public space and the built environment, such as architecture, planning and urban design, as well as the social sciences. The book presents conceptual, practical and research challenges and brings together findings from activists, practitioners and theorists. The editors provide eight educational challenges that educators can endorse when training future practitioners and researchers to accept and to engage with the social relations that unfold in and through public space.